Related Links

Texas Panhandle evangelists for Route 66 praised a recently completed study quantifying the Mother Road’s nurturing effect on the economy as well as travelers’ collective heart for Americana.

The Rutgers University study, conducted from 2008 to 2011, determined tourists plow $38 million a year into the economies of communities along the celebrated highway running from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif.

The route “gestated in the booming 1920s” and, completely paved by 1937, became a nostalgic roadway bypassed by the United States interstate system by the 1960s and ’70s. It still makes its siren call to thousands of travelers, the study’s authors concluded.

Heritage preservation, through Main Street revitalization programs and museums, adds another $94 million in annual investments, bringing the national impact to an annual gain of 2,400 jobs, $90 million in income, $127 million in gross domestic product and $37 million in tax revenues.

On Saturday, Amarillo artist Bob “Crocodile” Lile hosted a touring group of Australians at his gallery at 2719 S.W. Sixth Ave. They made a stopover for the night.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have as many domestics (traveling Route 66) as we’d like,” Lile said. “A lot of them just travel portions of the road. But for the foreigners, it’s Americana, it’s American history from the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. They just dig what we were, what we stood for.”

Lile, who has twice traveled the route from Chicago to L.A., said he worked for the “Route 66 Pulse,” a now-defunct publication that helped Rutgers complete what it claims is the “first-ever national survey of travelers along Route 66.”

Almost 4,200 people responded to the questionnaires distributed along the highway’s full 2,400 miles and placed, specifically, at 33 popular Route 66 destinations, including Shamrock’s restored Tower Station and U-Drop Inn Cafe.

The U-Drop and other Mother-Road landmarks became models for locations depicted in the Disney Pixar film “Cars.” Cars Land, a new theme park with a replica of the U-Drop, will open in June at the Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim, Calif., said David Rushing, president of the Texas Route 66 group.

“We probably have 2,000 to 2,500 people a month that stop in here,” said Rushing, who also is director of Shamrock’s economic development corporation. “It’s important that we capture that traffic.”

In June, Shamrock will start its third season of Thursday Nights Under the Neon, free summertime concerts performed in the colorful glow of the U-Drop, Rushing said. The initial year was slow, but marketing through Route 66 affiliates, connections with tour companies and social media is paying off, he said.

“You have to have something for them (tourists) to do,” Rushing said. “Our philosophy is to become a destination and not a pass-through. ... Nothing against Amarillo. They all want to go to The Big Texan (Steak Ranch) and that’s part of it. But we want to capture some of that, too.”

Travelers who answered the survey represented all 50 states and about 40 foreign countries. Almost 85 percent listed U.S. residences, while 15 percent came from abroad.

Dale Butel’s Brisbane, Australia-based Route 66 Tours conducts three tours a year, bringing customers to Chicago to start down the road on motorcycles, in SUVs or souped-up sports cars. Last week, five guides, including Butel, accompanied about 60 clients on the Mother Road, arriving Saturday in Amarillo.

On April 24, the Aussies indulged in an evening pizza party beside the pool of a Lebanon, Mo., landmark, the Munger Moss Motel, and photographs with its neon sign, Butel said by phone the next day.

“Route 66 holds a fascination for Australians and New Zealanders, who are my primary clients,” Butel said.

“We try and drive the old road wherever possible. About 80 percent of it’s left.”

The Rutgers study concludes, “Compared to new construction and such stimulus favorites as investing in highways, historic preservation — such as historic rehabilitation of Route 66 properties — is a reasonably comparable, if not superior, economic pump-primer.”

Researchers pointed to an Oklahoma case study they said shows “preservation generally has more economic stimulus ‘bang for the buck’ ... especially concerning job creation.”

The study includes 25 case studies, including one of Shamrock’s U-Drop Inn.

“As documented time and time again in these 25 case studies, in many smaller communities along Route 66, tourism related to the Mother Road is one of the most significant, if not the only, ‘economic game in town,’” according to the study. “The restored Route-66-themed motel, restaurant and gift shop may not have a high-dollar business volume ... yet they anchor the downtown in many small communities and change the perceived image of a place from a dowager town abandoned by the interstate to a community with a Route-66-linked past and future.”

Butel cautions against going too far to restore the road, however.

“To be honest with you, there’s only so much the road can do,” he said. “If you threw millions and millions and millions of dollars at it, it would remove a lot of the mystique.

“If we want to see Route 66 in a Disney sense, we’ll go to Cars Land. Some of the favorite places on Route 66 are the ghost towns. They’re never going to be viable to have any businesses in them.”

Butel’s tours travel 100 to 200 miles a day and, therefore, can’t stay in every town. “There’s only so much of the pie to go around,” he said.

American Express funded the study, which Rutgers researchers carried out in collaboration with the National Park Service Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program and the World Monuments Fund.

The World Monuments Fund placed Route 66 on its 2008 World Monuments Watch List, which identifies potentially endangered landmarks and places.